Posts Tagged ‘Media’
Stoned Journalist Reports On Marijuana (Video)
There may be hope for the dinosaur media after all if this clip represents the future of reporting at the LA Times:
Mea Culpa: Fox News Keeps Making Conservative-Friendly Mistakes
From Daily Finance:
Every news organization makes mistakes. But when Fox News makes mistakes, they seem to tilt in a suspiciously consistent direction, favoring Republicans and conservatives over Democrats and liberals.
It happened again Wednesday, when host Gregg Jarrett, introducing a segment on Happening Now, described the “huge crowds” that were turning out to greet Sarah Palin on the promotional tour for her book, Going Rogue. “These are some of the pictures just coming into us,” Jarrett said as images of Palin surrounded by throngs of supporters flashed across the screen.
While Palin may indeed be drawing big crowds, it didn’t take long for liberal watchdog blogs like Think Progress and Media Matters to point out that the masses Jarrett touted on Happening Now had nothing to do with Palin’s book…
Colby The Christian Robot Wants Your Soul
Great find. A Christian “robot” — the jokes write themselves. Meredith Woerner on io9.com:
This is Colby, the Christian robot. Fast forward to 3:40 when his robot army tries to transform the bullying kid into another Christian robot, singing, “We are all robots, you must be a robot too.” [ via Everything Is Terrible]
Side Note: Apparently I need to point out that this is an edited version of the show, thought you could tell that from the cuts but now it’s all out in the open, it’s edited. But they still want to turn that kid into a robot.
The Man Who Made You Put Away Your Pen
Listen on NPR:
When was the last time you actually set pen to paper and mailed off a personal letter to someone? It’s probably been awhile — and the man to blame is Ray Tomlinson.
Back in 1971, Tomlinson was a young engineer at the Boston firm of Bolt, Beranek and Newman — known today as BBN Technologies. He’d been given a task: Figure out something interesting to do with ARPANET, the newborn computer network that was the predecessor of the modern-day Internet.
“We were working on ways in which humans and computers could interact,” he tells NPR’s Guy Raz. But instead, Tomlinson started tinkering with the interaction — or lack of it — between distant colleagues who didn’t answer their phones. He eventually found a way to send messages from one computer…
As the Rudes Get Ruder, the Scolds Get Scoldier
Does this story belong in “the paper of record” (for those who forgot, that was the New York Times once upon a time)? It’s hardly news, but now that very few people wait for a printed newspaper to learn what’s happening in their world, perhaps this is the type of story we should expect from the dino-media:
Amy Alkon, a syndicated advice columnist and self-described “manners psycho,” certainly thinks so. Just ask “Barry,” a loud cellphone talker she encountered recently at a Starbucks in Santa Monica, Calif.
“He just blatantly took over the whole place with his conversation, streaming his dull life into everybody’s brain,” Ms. Alkon recalled in a telephone interview.
Among the personal details Barry shared that day — errands to run, plans for the evening — was his phone number, which…
About Half in U.S. Would Pay for Online News, Study Finds
Would you pay to read this article in the New York Times? Would you pay to read the news, views, and opinions at disinfo.com? Is there any online news source you couldn’t substitute for free?
Right, I thought so … so is this story just wishful thinking by the mainstream media?
Americans, it turns out, are less willing than people in many other Western countries to pay for their online news, according to a new study by the Boston Consulting Group.
Among regular Internet users in the United States, 48 percent said in the survey, conducted in October, that they would pay to read news online, including on mobile devices. That result tied with Britain for the lowest figure among nine countries where Boston Consulting commissioned surveys. In several Western European countries, more than…
Mommy Bloggers or Corporate Shills?
P.J. Huffstutter and Jerry Hirsch writes in the LA Times:
On most days, Andrea Deckard can be found in her home office, digging through stacks of coupons and grocery receipts for money saving tips and recipes that she can share with readers of her Mommy Snacks blog.
That is, when the stay-at-home mom isn’t being wined and dined by giant food companies. Earlier this year, Frito-Lay flew her to Los Angeles to meet celebrities such as model Brooke Burke and the Spice Girls’ Mel B, while pitching her on its latest snack ad campaign.
More recently, Nestle paid to put her and 16 other so-called “mommy bloggers” — and one daddy blogger — up at the posh Langham Huntington hotel in Pasadena, treated them to a private show at the Magic Castle in Hollywood and sent packages of frozen Omaha Steaks to their families to tide them over while the women were away learning all about the company’s latest product lines.
In return, Deckard and her virtual sisterhood filed Twitter posts raving about Nestle’s canned pumpkin, Wonka candy and Juicy Juice drinks.
“People have accused us of being corporate shills,” said Deckard, a Monroe, Ohio, mother of three whose junkets have also included a free trip to Frito-Lay’s Texas headquarters. Deckard, noting that she is up front with her readers about such trips, said they are educational for her and her fans, and “just fun.”
Besides, she added, “it’s not like I sold my soul for a chocolate bar.”
Sometimes Twittering Sh*t Your Dad Says Gets You A TV Deal
MG Siegler writes on TechCrunch:
Back in August, we wrote about Shit My Dad Says, the Twitter account of a 28-year-old guy named Justin who literally just tweeted out things his dad said. At the time, he already had over 100,000 followers on Twitter, now he has over 700,000. And now he just landed a TV deal.
Yes, you read that right. A 20-something just landed a TV deal thanks to his Twitter account. Again, not a website, not a book (though there is a book in the works too), just a Twitter account.
The TV industry blog The Live Feed reports that CBS is working with Justin (whose last name is Halpern) to create the show along with Will & Grace creators David Kohan and Max Mutchnick. Halpern will write it along with…
U.S. Justice Dept. Asked for IndyMedia’s Visitor Lists
Kevin Bankston writes on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s website:
Can the U.S. government secretly subpoena the IP address of every visitor to a political website? No, but that didn’t stop it from trying.
In a report released today, EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston tells the story of a bogus federal subpoena issued to independent news site Indymedia.us, and how the site fought back with EFF’s help. Declan McCullagh at CBSNews.com also has the story.
The report describes how, earlier this year, U.S. attorneys issued a federal grand jury subpoena to Indymedia.us administrator Kristina Clair demanding “all IP traffic to and from www.indymedia.us” for a particular date, potentially identifying every person who visited any news story on the Indymedia site. As the report explains, this overbroad demand for internet records not only violated federal…
Alternate-Universe Sci-Fi Channel Show Asks What Would Happen If Germany Lost War
Via The Onion:
NEW MUNICH—The new Sci-Fi Channel series Fallen Axis, which eerily depicts a world in which Germany actually lost the Second World War, premiered Tuesday evening to high ratings in an alternate universe to our own.
The much-anticipated television event is said to be the most ambitious ever produced by the science-fiction-themed network, which is a subsidiary of the Aryan Broadcasting Company. According to the early response, audiences in the alternate realm have been riveted by the show’s vision of an inverted existence wherein a defeated Germany has been completely neutered by the Allied powers.
“Imagine, if you will, a world in which Hitler’s glorious master plan had instead ended in ignominious failure, and the Allies had somehow emerged the victors,” the show’s creator, Leonhardt Riefenstahl, said during an appearance on…
Even Muppets Hate Fox News
It’s no surprise to regular visitors to the disinformation site that we generally take every opportunity to point out just how biased and unfair Fox News Channel truly is (and of course we distributed the classic dissection of FNC, Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism), but should children’s TV shows on public television do the same?
Esquire’s Augmented Reality Issue Starring Robert Downey Jr. Is Live [VIDEO]
Mashable asks all the right questions about Esquire’s attempt to blend its magazine with its website, in this story by Adam Ostrow:
Last month, we learned that Esquire was once again going experimental, this time with its December issue featuring augmented reality. The issue is now available, and readers that have it can head to Esquire’s website to check out the special augmented reality features.
In addition to featuring an AR cover, where Robert Downey Jr. introduces you to the issue (and throws in a pitch for his upcoming movie Sherlock Holmes), there are several pieces of bonus content that can be accessed and controlled on Esquire’s website by downloading an app and pointing the AR marker at your webcam.
I got an early look at the issue last week. As Editor-in-Chief David…
Josh Harris: The Warhol of the Web
Andrew Smith writes in the Guardian:
I couldn’t have been more surprised to find Josh Harris in Ethiopia. In Manhattan in the mid-1990s, he had been “the Warhol of the Web” — one of the first internet multimillionaires, who took the $80m fortune he’d made and started to explore the possibilities and implications of this new technology, to the point of self-destruction. In the process, he became the focal point of the downtown New York scene that, for heady extravagance, rivalled anything from the 1960s or 1970s.
His Millennium Eve party, called Quiet: We Live in Public, ran for over a month, during which an ad-hoc community of human subjects lived in pods in a six-storey Broadway warehouse, each pod wired up and effectively functioning as a TV channel, streamed live to the web via Harris’s online TV portal at Pseudo.com. It was 1,000 times more vital and acute than the still-nascent Big Brother. “Don’t bring your money,” Harris said. “Everything here is free.”
Quiet featured a shooting range you could hear from the street, a banquet hall, theatre, temple, club, giant game of Risk, and a public shower area, all covered by cameras. But more than anything, it offered its residents complete freedom. There were drugs and public sex — at one point, Harris, in the guise of a clown called Luvvy, attempted to coordinate simultaneous orgasms between three couples.
Just about anything that could happen did happen, and many people have called it an experiment. But Ondi Timoner, director of We Live in Public, a Sundance-winning documentary about Harris that opens in the UK next week, shrewdly calls it a metaphor. My feeling is that Harris wasn’t saying, “This could happen” but “This will happen”. This is where the technology is taking us; and what’s more, it’s where we want to go.
More in the Guardian. Here’s the trailer:
